The Department of Modern Art surveys painting, sculpture, drawings and watercolors, decorative arts, design, and architectural representations from about 1900 to the present day in more than 10,000 works, primarily by European and American artists. The Metropolitan Museum has been concerned with the art of its own time, as well as that of the past, since its founding in 1870. Many of the objects acquired as contemporary in the early decades of the Museum's existence are now in the collections of other departments—The American Wing, for instance, or the Department of European Paintings.

Those works that entered the collection before the turn of the century and still qualify as "modern" join many, many more acquired over the past hundred years. The strengths of the modern-art collection are housed in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Of particular note are the paintings by members of the School of Paris, such as Braque, Picasso, and Modigliani; paintings and drawings by the circle of early American modernists around Alfred Stieglitz; over ninety works by Paul Klee; large-scale paintings by the postwar Abstract Expressionists; bronzes by Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise; as well as paintings, drawings, and prints by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. The modern design collection features prominently the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh; the work of Josef Hoffmann and other members of the Wiener Werkstätte; Art Nouveau jewelry by René Lalique; Art Deco furniture by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann; and Italian and Japanese objects of the 1970s.

More about the Department and Its Collection

In 1906, George A. Hearn, a trustee of the Museum, established a fund in his name for the purchase of art by living American painters; a second fund, in the name of his son Arthur Hoppock Hearn, was established five years later. During the first decades of the twentieth century, fewer examples were acquired by European artists than by Americans; but certain purchases are notable, such as Renoir's Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (1878) in 1907 and Cézanne's View of the Domain Saint Joseph (1889) from the Armory Show in 1913. In the year of Monet's death, 1926, the Museum received its first gift of one of his paintings (note: Renoir, Cézanne, and Monet are now part of the Department of European Paintings collection). For a long while the Museum's holdings of modern art were divided among various departments of American and European painting and decorative art. In 1967, a separate Department of Contemporary Art was formed. Three years later it was incorporated into a new Department of Twentieth-Century Art, the purpose of which was to unite the Museum's paintings, sculptures, drawings, and decorative arts created since 1900. This department was renamed the Department of Modern Art in 1999.

Thanks to a number of important gifts and bequests—several of which are detailed below—as well as purchases made by the Museum, the collection of modern art has grown substantially over the decades. A new wing devoted to modern art—The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing—opened in 1987. Adding 60,000 square feet of exhibition space, storage, and offices on four levels has substantially increased public awareness of and access to the Metropolitan's modern holdings.

During the 1940s the Museum received two important gifts—one of a single painting and the other of a large collection. Upon her death in 1946, the Museum was notified of Gertrude Stein's bequest of the famous portrait Picasso had painted of her in 1906; it was his first painting to enter the Museum's collection. In 1949 the Museum received a gift of over 200 works from the late photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz's personal collection including paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Kandinsky, Brancusi, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, and Severini; works by two Mexican artists, Marius de Zayas and Diego Rivera; and comprehensive representations of the paintings and drawings of those American artists closely associated with Stieglitz's galleries: Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Between 1950 and 1960 the Museum augmented its early paintings by Picasso with three important gifts and, in 1953, with two purchases from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Purchased at the same time from the Museum of Modern Art were paintings by Rouault and Matisse. In 1967, the bequest of Adelaide Milton de Groot featured many more paintings by artists of the School of Paris, as well as by the American artists Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, and John Kane. Miss de Groot also left to the Museum Max Beckmann's great triptych Beginning (1949). Between 1955 and 1975 the Museum acquired paintings that had been recently completed by a number of American artists, including Milton Avery, William Baziotes, Richard Diebenkorn, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Ad Reinhardt.

Since 1980 the pace of twentieth-century acquisitions, both American and European, has accelerated. In 1991, eight works from the Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, including Sheeler's Americana and Stuart Davis's Report from Rockport, strengthened the Museum's representation of prewar American painting. From several other sources, major works by the American Abstract Expressionists have entered the collection, including ten paintings by Clyfford Still; four paintings and four drawings by Willem de Kooning; and two paintings, forty drawings, and three sketchbooks by Jackson Pollock.

Scofield Thayer's large bequest in 1982 brought additional early paintings by Picasso; Matisse's Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance" (1912), exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913; four paintings by Bonnard; and thirty-one drawings and watercolors by Egon Schiele. Heinz Berggruen's gift in 1984 and 1987 of ninety paintings and drawings by Paul Klee illustrates the artist's entire career; Lydia Winston Malbin's bequest in 1989 of two paintings, three bronzes, twenty-nine drawings, and nine etchings does the same for the career of Umberto Boccioni. In 1996, 1997, and 1998 the bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn, the gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection added to the department's concentration of compositions by Brancusi, Braque, de Chirico, Gris, La Fresnaye, Léger, Modigliani, Soutine, and Picasso.

From 1995 to 1998, the Museum purchased a large painting and forty-seven works on paper by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. Also in 1998, the department acquired an icon of American postwar painting, Jasper Johns's White Flag (1955). Since 1997, gifts and promised gifts from John C. Waddell's extraordinary collection of modern American design objects has expanded the department's already significant holdings with masterworks by Donald Deskey, Eliel Saarinen, Paul Frankl, and Isamu Noguchi.